The use of cloud computing platforms has rapidly increased in the past several years. The cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon AWS, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and the like, provide a number of services that allows companies to minimize initial information technology infrastructure expenses and also enable companies to adjust resources to meet unpredictable demand fluctuations.
An enterprise user may utilize more than one cloud computing platform to mitigate the remote chance that a particular cloud computing platform may suffer a failure or an even a catastrophic failure, and all of the enterprises data and or services may be lost. Also, depending upon the geographic locations of a cloud computing platforms, the enterprise may use multiple different cloud computing platform providers to allow for expansion of service when one geographic region experiences greater and perhaps unanticipated usage as compared to a cloud computing platform located thousands of miles away.
Experience with the cloud computing platforms offered by different providers shows that data may easily be input into a respective cloud computing platform; however, extracting the data and storing it into another provider's cloud computing platform may be challenging. Challenges particularly arise when a user wishes to copy less than all of the data stored on a data storage disk in one could computing platform and transfer the copied data to another provider's cloud computing platform.
Present cloud computing platforms commonly store data in files or records on a data storage disk maintained by the cloud computing provider. In an e-commerce example, the data stored in a respective file may be product data, vendor data, customer data, enterprise data or the like. The data files or records, which may number into the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of files, may consume several data storage disks on multiple different servers. When an enterprise user desires to copy data from the data storage disks in the cloud computing platform, the enterprise user must often use copy an entire data storage disk that contains the data that the enterprise user is interested in copying. Even if the enterprise user desires to only copy a small number of data files, the enterprise user is typically required to copy the entire data storage disk, using a “block copy.” As a result, the time required to make the data transfer increases as well as might the cost as resources are used for longer periods of time, more data is transferred and exposed to potential loss, and more data storage space in the new cloud computing platform that is receiving the copied data must be used.
The data replication services existing on most cloud computing platforms commonly utilize the less secure internet small computer systems interface (iSCSI), a standard for internet protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities.
Moreover, often times it is not as easy to simply copy data from one cloud computing platform and simply store the copied data to the new cloud computing platform because the new cloud computing platform may have different data conventions and formatting than the previous cloud computing platform from which the data is being copied. So not only does an excessive amount of data have to be transferred but the data that is not of interest typically must also be converted for storage in the new cloud computing platform.
Therefore, improvements that overcome the above inefficiencies of the present cloud computing platforms would be beneficial and advantageous to a number of cloud computing platform customers and/or users.